1. The
Ordovician-Silurian Extinction, which occurred about 439
million years ago, wiped out 86% of life on Earth at the
time. Most scientists believe that this mass extinction was
precipitated by glaciation and falling sea levels (possibly
a result of the Appalachian mountain range forming),
catastrophically impacting animal life which lived largely
in the ocean at the time.

2. The Late Devonian Extinction
happened about 364 million years ago and destroyed 75% of
species on Earth. Possibly spread over hundreds of thousands
of years, a sequence of events that depleted the oceans of
oxygen and volcanic ash that cooled the Earth’s surface
are believed to have driven the extinctions. It was to be 10
million years before vertebrates again appeared on land.
‘If the late Devonian extinction had not occurred, humans
might not exist today.’

3. The Permian-Triassic
extinction, which occurred 251 million years ago, is
considered the worst in all history because around 96% of
species were lost. ‘The Great Dying’ was precipitated by
an enormous volcanic eruption ‘that filled the air with
carbon dioxide which fed different kinds of bacteria that
began emitting large amounts of methane. The Earth warmed,
and the oceans became acidic.’ Life today descended from
the 4% of surviving species.

4. The Triassic-Jurassic
extinction happened between 214 million and 199 million
years ago and, as in other mass extinctions, it is believed
there were several phases of species loss. The blame has
been placed on an asteroid impact, climate disruption and
flood basalt eruptions. This extinction laid the path that
allowed for the evolution of dinosaurs which later survived
for about 135 million years.

5. The Cretaceous-Paleogene
extinction, best known of ‘the Big 5’ mass extinctions,
occurred 65 million years ago, ending 76% of life on Earth
including the dinosaurs. A combination of volcanic activity,
asteroid impact, and climate disruption are blamed. This
extinction period allowed for the evolution of mammals on
land and sharks in the sea.

6. The sixth mass extinction
event in Earth’s history is the one that is being
experienced now. Unlike earlier mass extinctions, which
helped to pave the way for the evolution of Homo sapiens,
the precipitating cause of this extinction event is Homo
sapiens itself and, moreover, Homo sapiens is slated to be
one of the species that becomes extinct.

Let me explain
why this is so by touching on the diverse range of forces
driving the extinctions, concepts such as
‘co-extinction’, ‘localized extinctions’ and
‘extinction cascades’, the ways in which extinction
impacts are often ‘hidden’ in the short term, thus
masking the true extent of the destruction, and the
implications of all this for life on Earth, including Homo
sapiens, in the near term.

But before I do this, consider
this excerpt from the book Sapiens: A Brief History of
Humankind written by Yuval Noah Harari, commenting
on the expansion of ancient humans out of Africa:

‘If we
combine the mass extinctions in Australia and America, and
add the smaller-scale extinctions that took place as Homo
sapiens spread over Afro-Asia – such as the extinction of
all other human species – and the extinctions that
occurred when ancient foragers settled remote islands such
as Cuba, the inevitable conclusion is that the first wave of
Sapiens colonisation was one of the biggest and swiftest
ecological disasters to befall the animal kingdom. Hardest
hit were the large furry creatures. At the time of the
Cognitive Revolution [which Harari argues occurred during
the period between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago and probably
involved an internal restructuring of the Sapiens brain to
facilitate learning, remembering, imagining and
communicating while also, in the case of the earlier date,
coinciding with the time when Sapiens bands started leaving
Africa for the second time], the planet was home to about
200 genera of large terrestrial mammals weighing over fifty
kilograms. At the time of the Agricultural Revolution [about
12,000 years ago], only about a hundred remained. Homo
sapiens drove to extinction about half of the planet’s
big beasts long before humans invented the wheel, writing or
iron tools.

‘This ecological tragedy was restaged in
miniature countless times after the Agricultural
Revolution’ with mammoths, for example, vanishing from the
Eurasian and North American landmasses by 10,000 years ago
as Homo sapiens spread. Despite this, mammoths thrived until
just 4,000 years ago on a few remote Arctic islands, most
conspicuously Wrangel, then suddenly disappeared with the
arrival of humans.

And the
onslaught has never ended as the inexorable encroachment of
Homo sapiens to the remotest corners of the Earth (including
virtually all of the thousands of islands of the Atlantic,
Indian and Pacific Oceans) has inevitably led to the
extinction of myriad local species including birds, insects
and snails. In fact, following the Industrial Revolution
about 270 years ago which enabled the development of killing
technologies on a scale unheard of previously, the human
assault on life on Earth has accelerated so effectively that
200 species of life are now driven to extinction
daily.

Whatever other claims they might make
about themselves, human beings are truly the masters of
death.

The primary human behaviours that are
modifying Earth’s biosphere, with catastrophic outcomes
for many species, are readily apparent and well-described in
the scientific literature: destruction of habitat (such as
oceans, rainforests, grasslands, wetlands, mangroves, lakes
and coral reefs) whether through military violence,
radioactive contamination, industrial activities (including
ecosystem destruction to build cities, roads and railroads
but a vast range of other activities besides), chemical
poisoning or other means; over-exploitation; biotic invasion
and the effects of environmental modification, including
climatic conditions, leading to temperature rise, more
frequent droughts, ocean acidification and other impacts
which so alter a locality’s environmental conditions that
tolerance limits for inhabiting species are breached causing
localized extinctions. Unfortunately, however, there are
other, more complicated, mechanisms that can exacerbate
species loss.

‘In particular, it is becoming
increasingly evident how biotic interactions, in addition to
permitting the emergence and maintenance of diversity, also
build up complex networks through which the loss of one
species can make more species disappear (a process known as
‘co-extinction’), and possibly bring entire systems to
an unexpected, sudden regime shift, or even total
collapse.’ In simple language, a species cannot survive
without the resources (the other species) on which it
depends for survival and the accelerating loss of species
now threatens ‘total collapse’ of ‘entire
systems’.

This is because resource and consumer
interactions in natural systems (such as food webs) are
organized in various hierarchical levels of complexity
(including trophic levels), so the removal of resources can
result in the cascading (bottom-up) extinction of several
higher-level consumers.

Summarizing the findings of
several studies based on simulated or real-world data, Dr.
Giovanni Strona and Professor Corey J. A. Bradshaw explain
why ‘we should expect most events of species loss to cause
co-extinctions, as corroborated by the worrisome, unnatural
rate at which populations and species are now disappearing,
and which goes far beyond what one expects as a simple
consequence of human endeavour. In fact, even the most
resilient species will inevitably fall victim to the
synergies among extinction drivers as extreme stresses drive
biological communities to collapse. Furthermore,
co-extinctions are often triggered well before the complete
loss of an entire species, so that even oscillations in the
population size of a species could result in the local
disappearance of other species depending on the first. This
makes it difficult to be optimistic about the future of
species diversity in the ongoing trajectory of global
change, let alone in the case of additional external,
planetary-scale catastrophes.’

In an attempt to
emphasize the importance of this phenomenon, Strona and
Bradshaw note that ‘As our understanding of the importance
of ecological interactions in shaping ecosystem identity
advances, it is becoming clearer how the disappearance of
consumers following the depletion of their resources – a
process known as “co-extinction” – is more likely
the major driver of biodiversity loss’ [emphasis
added] and that ‘ecological dependencies amplify the
direct effects of environmental change on the collapse of
planetary diversity by up to ten times.’ See ‘Co-extinctions annihilate planetary life
during extreme environmental change’.

‘Earth’s sixth mass
extinction is more severe than perceived when looking
exclusively at species extinctions…. That conclusion is
based on analyses of the numbers and degrees of range
contraction … using a sample of 27,600 vertebrate species,
and on a more detailed analysis documenting the population
extinctions between 1900 and 2015 in 177 mammal species.’
Their research found that the rate of population loss in
terrestrial vertebrates is ‘extremely high’, even in
‘species of low concern’.

In their sample, comprising
nearly half of known vertebrate species, 32% (8,851 out of
27,600) are decreasing; that is, they have decreased in
population size and range. In the 177 mammals for which they
had detailed data, all had lost 30% or more of their
geographic ranges and more than 40% of the species had
experienced severe population declines. Their data revealed
that ‘beyond global species extinctions Earth is
experiencing a huge episode of population declines and
extirpations, which will have negative cascading
consequences on ecosystem functioning and services vital to
sustaining civilization. We describe this as a “biological
annihilation” to highlight the current magnitude of
Earth’s ongoing sixth major extinction
event.’

Illustrating the damage done by dramatically
reducing the historic geographic range of a species,
consider the lion. Panthera leo ‘was historically
distributed over most of Africa, southern Europe, and the
Middle East, all the way to northwestern India. It is now
confined to scattered populations in sub-Saharan Africa and
a remnant population in the Gir forest of India. The vast
majority of lion populations are gone.’

Why is this
happening? Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo tell us: ‘In the
last few decades, habitat loss, overexploitation, invasive
organisms, pollution, toxification, and more recently
climate disruption, as well as the interactions among these
factors, have led to the catastrophic declines in both the
numbers and sizes of populations of both common and rare
vertebrate species.’

Further, however, the authors warn
‘But the true extent of this mass extinction has been
underestimated, because of the emphasis on species
extinction.’ This underestimate can be traced to
overlooking the accelerating extinction of local populations
of a species.

‘Population extinctions today are orders
of magnitude more frequent than species extinctions.
Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species
extinctions, so Earth’s sixth mass extinction episode has
proceeded further than most assume.’ Moreover, and
importantly from a narrow human perspective, the massive
loss of local populations is already damaging the services
ecosystems provide to civilization (which, of course, are
given no value by government and corporate economists and
accountants).

As Ceballos, Ehrlich and Dirzo remind us:
‘When considering this frightening assault on the
foundations of human civilization, one must never forget
that Earth’s capacity to support life, including human
life, has been shaped by life itself.’ When public mention
is made of the extinction crisis, it usually focuses on a
few (probably iconic) animal species known to have gone
extinct, while projecting many more in future. However, a
glance at their maps presents a much more realistic picture:
as much as 50% of the number of animal individuals that once
shared Earth with us are already gone, as are billions of
local populations.

Furthermore, they claim that their
analysis is conservative given the increasing trajectories
of those factors that drive extinction together with their
synergistic impacts. ‘Future losses easily may amount to a
further rapid defaunation of the globe and comparable losses
in the diversity of plants, including the local (and
eventually global) defaunation-driven coextinction of
plants.’

They conclude with the chilling observation:
‘Thus, we emphasize that the sixth mass extinction is
already here and the window for effective action is very
short.’

Another recent study examined ‘Experimental Evidence for the
Population-Dynamic Mechanisms Underlying Extinction Cascades
of Carnivores’, and was undertaken by Dr. Dirk
Sanders, Rachel Kehoe & Professor F.J. Frank van Veen who
sought to understand ‘extinction cascades’. Noting that
‘Species extinction rates due to human activities are
high’, they investigated and documented how ‘initial
extinctions can trigger cascades of secondary extinctions,
leading to further erosion of biodiversity.’ This occurs
because the diversity of consumer species is maintained due
to the positive indirect effects that these species have on
each other by reducing competition among their respective
resource species. That is, the loss of one carnivore species
can lead to increased competition among prey, leading to
extinctions of those carnivore species dependent on prey
that loses this competition.

Another way of explaining
this was offered by Dr. Jose M. Montoya: ‘Species do not
go extinct one at a time. Instead… ecosystems change in a
kind of chain reaction, just like in bowling. The impact of
the ball knocks down one or two pins, but they hit other
pins and this ultimately determines your score. Likewise,
when in an ecosystem one species goes extinct many others
may follow even if they are not directly affected by the
initial disturbance. The complex combination of direct and
indirect effects resulting from species interactions
determines the fate of the remaining species. To predict the
conditions under which extinctions beget further extinctions
is a major scientific and societal challenge under the
current biodiversity crisis…. Sanders and colleagues…
show how and why initial extinctions of predators trigger
cascades of secondary extinctions of the remaining
predators.’ See ‘Ecology: Dynamics of Indirect
Extinction’.

To fully grasp the extent of the crisis
in our biosphere, we must look well beyond Earth’s
climate: There are a great many variables adversely
impacting life on Earth, many of which individually pose the
threat of human extinction and which, synergistically, now
virtually guarantee it absent an immediate and profound
response. As reported in the recent Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and
Ecosystem Services researched and published by the
Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity
and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) – the scientific body which
assesses the state of biodiversity and the ecosystem
services this provides to society – ‘Nature is declining
globally at rates unprecedented in human history. The IPBES
Global Assessment ranks, for the first time at this
scale, the 5 direct drivers of change in nature with the
largest global impact. So what are the culprits behind
nature’s destruction?’ Number 1. on the IPBES list is
‘Changes in land and sea use, like turning intact tropical
forests into agricultural land’ but, as noted, there are
four others. According to this report: one
million species of life on Earth are threatened with
extinction.

Of course, separately from the
systemic extinction drivers noted above, including the
unmentioned destruction of Earth’s oceans through its
absorption of carbon dioxide, pollution with everything from
pesticides to plastic, and chronic overfishing which is
pushing many ocean species to, or over, the brink of
extinction as well, humans also engage in yet other
activities that drive the rush to extinction. Hunting
wildlife to kill it for trophies or pet food – see ‘Killing Elephants “for Pet Food”
Condemned’ – and trafficking wildlife: a $10-20
billion-a-year industry involving illegal wildlife products
such as jewelry, traditional ‘medicine’, clothing,
furniture, and souvenirs, as well as exotic pets – see ‘Stop Wildlife Trafficking’ and ‘China must lead global effort against
tiger trade’ – play vital roles as well.

In
summary, the tragedy of human existence is that the
Cognitive Revolution gave Homo sapiens the capacity to plan,
organize and conduct an endless sequence of systematic
massacres all over the planet but, assuming that we have the
genetic capacity to do so, our parenting and education
models since that time have ensured that we have been denied
the emotional and intellectual capacities to fight,
strategically, for our own survival. And the time we have
left is now incredibly short.

So what can we
do?

Given that the ongoing, systematic
industrial-scale destruction of Earth’s wildlife has its
origin in evolutionary events that took place some 70,000
years ago but which probably had psychological origins prior
to this, it is clearly a crisis that is not about to be
resolved quickly or easily.

‘Why the mention of
psychology here?’ you might ask. Well, while many other
factors have obviously played a part – for example,
abundance of a species in a particular context might mean
that the issue of killing its individual members for food
does not even arise, at least initially – it is clear
that, given the well-documented multifaceted crisis in which
human beings now find themselves, only a grotesquely
insufficient effort is being put into averting the now
imminent extinction of our own species which critically
requires us to dramatically stem (and soon halt) the tide of
wildlife extinctions, among many other necessary responses.
See, for example, ‘Human Extinction by 2026? A Last Ditch
Strategy to Fight for Human Survival’ and ‘Doomsday by 2021?’

For that reason,
after 70,000 years, we must finally ask ‘Why?’ so that
we can address the fundamental drivers of our
extinction-threatening behaviour as well the several vital
symptoms that arise from those drivers. Let me explain what
I mean.

The fundamental question is this: Why
are humans behaving in a way that will precipitate our own
extinction in the near term? Surely, this is
neither sensible nor even sane. And anyone capable of
emotional engagement and rational thinking who seriously
considers this behaviour must realize this. So why is it
happening?

Fundamentally it is because our parenting and
education models since the Cognitive Revolution 70,000 years
ago have failed utterly to produce people of conscience,
people who are emotionally functional and capable of
critical analysis, people who care and who can plan and
respond to crises (or even problems) strategically. Despite
this profound social shortcoming, some individuals have
nevertheless emerged who have one or more of these qualities
and they are inevitably ‘condemned’ to sound the alarm,
in one way or another, and to try to mobilize an appropriate
response to whatever crisis or problem confronts them at the
time.

Given the
preoccupation of modern society with producing submissively
obedient students, workers, soldiers, citizens (that is,
taxpayers and voters) and consumers, the last thing society
wants is powerful individuals who are each capable of
searching their conscience, feeling their emotional response
to events, thinking critically and behaving strategically in
response. Hence our parenting and education models use a
ruthless combination of visible, ‘invisible’ and
‘utterly invisible’ violence to ensure that our children
become terrified, self-hating and powerless individuals like
virtually all of the adults around them.

So if we are going
to address the fundamental driver of both the destruction of
Earth’s wildlife and the biosphere generally, we must
address this cause. For those adults powerful enough to do
this, there is an explanation in ‘Putting Feelings First’. And for those
adults committed to facilitating children’s efforts to
realize their potential and become self-aware (rather than
delusional), see ‘My Promise to Children’ and ‘Nisteling: The Art of Deep
Listening’.

Beyond this cause, however, we must also
resist, strategically, the insane elite-controlled
governments and corporations that are a key symptom of this
crisis – see ‘The Global Elite is Insane
Revisited’ – by manufacturing and marketing a vast
range of wildlife (and life)-destroying products ranging
from weapons (conventional and nuclear) and fossil fuels to
products made by the destruction of habitat (including
oceans, rainforests, grasslands, wetlands, mangroves, lakes
and coral reefs) and the chemical poisoning of agricultural
land (to grow the food that most people eat) while also
using geoengineering and deploying 5G technology worldwide.
See Nonviolent Campaign Strategy.

But we
can also undermine this destruction, for example, by
refusing to buy the products provided by the elite’s
corporations (with the complicity of governments) that fight
wars (to enrich weapons corporations) to steal fossil fuels
(to enrich energy, aircraft and vehicle-manufacturing
corporations) or those corporations that make profits by
destroying habitats or producing poisoned food, for example.
We can do this by systematically reducing and altering our
consumption pattern and becoming more locally self-reliant
as outlined in ‘The
Flame Tree Project to Save Life on Earth’
or, even more simply, by committing to The Earth Pledge
(below).

In a nutshell, for example, if we do not travel
by car or aircraft, NATO governments will have much less
incentive to invade and occupy resource-rich countries to
steal their resources and corporations will gain zero profit
from destroying wildlife habitat as they endlessly seek to
extract the resources necessary to manufacture and fuel
these commodities thus saving vast numbers of animals (and
many other life forms besides) and easing pressure on the
biosphere generally.

The Earth
PledgeOut
of love for the Earth and all of its creatures, and my
respect for their needs, from this day onwards I pledge
that:1.
I will listen deeply to children (see explanation
above)2. I will not travel by
plane3. I will not travel by
car4. I will not eat meat and
fish5. I will only eat
organically/biodynamically grown
food6. I will minimize the
amount of fresh water I use, including by minimizing my
ownership and use of electronic
devices7. I will not buy
rainforest timber8. I will not
buy or use single-use plastic, such as bags, bottles,
containers, cups and straws9. I
will not use banks, superannuation (pension) funds or
insurance companies that provide any service to corporations
involved in fossil fuels, nuclear power and/or
weapons10. I will not accept
employment from, or invest in, any organization that
supports or participates in the exploitation of fellow human
beings or profits from killing and/or destruction of the
biosphere11. I will not get news
from the corporate media (mainstream newspapers, television,
radio, Google, Facebook,
Twitter…)12. I will make the
effort to learn a skill, such as food gardening or sewing,
that makes me more
self-reliant13. I will gently
encourage my family and friends to consider signing this
pledge.

Conclusion

Perhaps
the key point to be learned from the evidence cited above is
that just as we have triggered a series of self-reinforcing
feedback loops that ‘lock in’ an ongoing deterioration
of Earth’s climate which we are now virtually powerless to
halt (if we were even trying to do so), we have also
precipitated a biodiversity crisis that is self-reinforcing
because the loss of each and every species has an impact on
those species that are dependent on it, precipitating chains
of events that make further extinctions inevitable. This is
one of the ‘negative synergies’, for example,
contributing to the Amazon rainforest’s rapid approach to
the tipping point at which it will collapse. See ‘Amazon Tipping Point’.

Hence, we
are approaching the final act of a tragedy that had its
origins in the Cognitive Revolution some 70,000 years ago
and which we have not been able to contain in any way. The
earlier acts of this tragedy were the countless species of
plants, birds, animals, fish, amphibians, insects and
reptiles that Homo sapiens has driven to extinction.

Now,
in the final act, we will drive to extinction 200 species
today. 200 species tomorrow. 200 species the day
after….

Until, one day very soon now, unless you and
those you know are willing to commit yourselves wholly to
the effort to avert this outcome, the human assault on life
on Earth will reach its inevitable conclusion: the
extinction of Homo sapiens.

Biodata: Robert J.
Burrowes has a lifetime commitment to understanding and
ending human violence. He has done extensive research since
1966 in an effort to understand why human beings are violent
and has been a nonviolent activist since 1981. He is the
author of ‘Why
Violence?’ His email address is flametree@riseup.net and his website is
here.

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